Indian and Chinese border troops exchanged gunfire last week, Indian officials said on Wednesday. The incident occurred just days before the foreign ministers from both countries met in Moscow to discuss tensions over the vague Line of Actual Control, the disputed border in the western Himalayas.

There have been three incidents of gunfire, mostly warning shots, since late August with no reported casualties. Since the two countries have had a long-standing agreement not to use firearms in the area, these incidents marked the first time in 45 years that India and China exchanged shots at the border.

Military sources told The South China Morning Post that Chinese border troops increased their combat readiness to the second-highest level after last week’s gunfire. The alert was lowered after the foreign ministers from India and China met in Moscow last week and agreed to reduce tensions.

The Chinese regime “poses the greatest threat to world order,” Britain’s Chief of Defence Intelligence told British media this week.

Lt. Gen. Jim Hockenhull, speaking at the first media briefing at the UK’s Defence Intelligence hub based at the Royal Air Force base in Wyton, Cambridgeshire, discussed how “global players such as Russia and China continually challenge the existing order without prompting direct conflict, operating in the expanding grey-zone between war and peacetime,” the Ministry of Defence said in a statement.

While Hockenhull saw Russia as posing “the greatest military and geopolitical threat to European security,” he reserved the starkest warning for China’s communist regime, The Telegraph reported.

Despite Beijing's threats centered on the 'red line' of the Taiwan issue, Washington only looks to ramp up its arms sales, which will no doubt earn more condemnations alleging violation of the 'One China' policy.

Reuters points out the US is content to further build up 'Fortress Taiwan' while "needling China" - as it "plans to sell as many as seven major weapons systems, including mines, cruise missiles and drones to Taiwan, four people familiar with the discussions said, as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on China."

After a summer of high level military to military talks appear to have unraveled — though they've prevented another major border breach like the June 15 brutal hand-to-hand combat clash which saw 20 Indian troops killed — multiple reports confirm a new build-up of thousands of Indian and Chinese troops on either side of the Ladakh region.

"Thousands of Indian and Chinese troops are still locked in an impasse across the mountain passes of the Himalayan region of Ladakh and the banks of the glacial lake Pangong Tso, with neither side backing down despite their foreign ministers having agreed five days ago to improve mutual trust and de-escalate tensions," South China Morning Post reported Tuesday.

And amid the blame game for the renewed mobilization of forces and the potential for more high altitude fighting, China's state-run Global Times says to expect Sino-Indian border tensions to likely "extend to winter".

A PAKISTANI minister has threatened India with a nuclear attack in "the bloody last war" and says only Muslims will survive.

Sheikh Rashid made the threat of nuclear war, claiming that Pakistan has very precise weapons which are “small and perfect” and are able to target specific regions.

On Sunday afternoon we asked how long before the twitter account of the "rogue" Chinese virologist, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who yesterday "shocked" the world of establishment scientists and other China sycophants, by publishing a "smoking gun" scientific paper demonstrating that the Covid-19 virus was manmade, is "silenced."

An experimental green housing project in a Chinese megacity promised prospective residents life in a 'vertical forest', with manicured gardens on every balcony.

All 826 apartments were sold out by April this year, according to the project's estate agent, but instead of a modern eco-paradise, the towers look like the set of a desolate, post-apocalyptic film.

Only a handful of families have moved into Chengdu's Qiyi City Forest Garden because of an infestation of mosquitoes, state media have reported.

On Saturday we reported that Dr. Li-Meng Yan - a Chinese virologist (MD, PhD) who fled the country, leaving her job at a prestigious Hong Kong university - appeared last week on British television where she claimed SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, was created by Chinese scientists in a lab.

"Chinese people don't want war, but we have territorial disputes with several neighboring countries instigated by the US to confront China. Some of these countries believe that the US support provides them with a strategic opportunity and try to treat China outrageously. They believe that China, under the US' strategic pressure, is afraid, unwilling or unable to engage in military conflict with them. Thus they want to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. Considering that there is also the Taiwan question, the risk of the Chinese mainland being forced into a war has risen sharply in recent times.

"Chinese society must therefore have real courage to engage calmly in a war that aims to protect core interests, and be prepared to bear the cost. In that way, China's comprehensive strength can be effectively transformed into a strategic deterrence against all kinds of provocateurs… China must be a country that dares to fight. And this should be based on both strength and morality."

On Saturday we reported that Dr. Li-Meng Yan - a Chinese virologist (MD, PhD) who fled the country, leaving her job at a prestigious Hong Kong university - appeared last week on British television where she claimed SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, was created by Chinese scientists in a lab.

The Communist government of China has combined its coronavirus ‘track and trace’ system with the country’s notorious social credit score.

In an unexpected move, former Iowa Gov Terry Branstad is stepping down from his position as the US Ambassador to China after more than three years on the job as tensions between Washington and Beijing reach a fever pitch ahead of the November election.

China has slammed a critical Pentagon report on the Communist country's military ambitions, saying the US is the one that poses the biggest threat to the international order and world peace.

Col. Wu Qian, spokesman from the Chinese Defence Ministry on Sunday called the report a 'wanton distortion' of China's aims and the relationship between the People's Liberation Army and China's 1.4 billion people.

The statement comes after the US Defence Department claims China's rapid military development would have 'serious implications for US national interests and the security of the international rules-based order' in an annual report.

A draft of an economic and security deal between the People's Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran previously leaked by The New York Times is continuing to reverberate in the international media. Iranian political analyst Mahan Abedin has explained the fuss over the accords and shed light on Iran's strategic shift towards the East.

The 18-page Persian-language document envisages multi-billion-dollar Chinese investments in the Iranian economy as well as considerable oil discounts for the People's Republic. The agreement also includes security cooperation, intelligence sharing, and joint military drills. Commenting on the leak, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif admitted that his country had indeed been negotiating a 25-year strategic partnership with China, adding, however, that the accords have yet to be passed by the Iranian parliament. The authenticity of the document in question has not been confirmed by Tehran so far.

Today is like one of those rare occasions when the Broadway understudy for a leading role finds out that the star has the ‘flu (not Covid-19) and so they get to go in front of the audience for once. Yes, Europe, today is your time to shine: “Everything’s coming up Milhouse!”.

Or not. Because the pressure is certainly on.

Several reports of new military drills and deployments in western China point to Beijing preparing for the dispute on the Indian border to become a wider conflict.

As tensions on the China-India border near Pangong Lake reach new highs, there is new evidence Beijing is moving more military forces into the region and preparing others in case they are needed, meaning they may be preparing for a larger conflict than the violent skirmishes seen in recent months.

On Tuesday, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Central Theater Command Air Force revealed that H-6 bombers and Y-20 transport aircraft have been deployed to the Tibetan Plateau for training missions, the Global Times reported.

China has an edge over the US in shipbuilding, and it could give the country an advantage in a protracted conflict in which both sides see heavy losses at sea, experts told Insider.

"China has already achieved parity with — or even exceeded — the United States in several military modernization areas," the Pentagon reported recently, identifying shipbuilding as one area where China has an advantage.

"The [People's Republic of China] has the largest navy in the world, with an overall battle force of approximately 350 ships and submarines including over 130 major surface combatants," the Pentagon assessed in its latest China Military Power report.

With military tensions surrounding Taiwan already on the rise, the island decided this would be a good time to conduct a series of missile tests from several areas. This sparked an immediate reaction from China, in the form of multi-role fighter jets.

The Defense Ministry reported the planes entered Taiwanese airspace early Wednesday, but that Taiwanese planes intercepted them and chased them back out of the area. China sent Su-30 and J-10 fighters. No serious incidents were reported.

Taiwanese officials condemned the “unilateral actions,” and tried to link them to President Tsai’s call for a coalition of democracies to defend freedom in the region. It seems clear, however, that the missile tests precipitated the reaction from China.

Indian and Chinese troops were facing off on Wednesday, barely a few hundred meters apart, in a remote Himalayan region where shots were fired for the first time in decades, Indian officials said.

The nuclear-armed neighbors have accused each other of firing in the air during a fresh flare-up in the Ladakh region on Monday, violating long-standing protocols to avoid using firearms along their undemarcated borders.

Images released by Central Theatre Command show at least three Xian H-6 bombers at base thought to be in Tibet.

Western Theatre Command says its troops took part in a live-fire air-defence exercise in a ‘northwestern desert’, believed to be in Xinjiang.

China appears to have deployed strategic bombers close to its border with India amid ongoing skirmishes between the two countries.
In photographs published on Tuesday on an official social media account of the People’s Liberation Army’s Central Theatre Command, at least three Xian H-6 bombers and a Xian Y-20 airlifter were shown at an airfield thought to be in the Tibet autonomous region.

The captions accompanying the images on Weibo – China’s Twitter-like platform – said ground crews had been stationed at a “high-altitude” base on a “plateau” – a description normally associated with Tibet.
They had been tasked with maintaining and refuelling the aircraft, the captions said.

Taiwanese warplanes intercepted Chinese planes and chased them off.

With military tensions surrounding Taiwan already on the rise, the island decided this would be a good time to conduct a series of missile tests from several areas. This sparked an immediate reaction from China, in the form of multi-role fighter jets.

The Defense Ministry reported the planes entered Taiwanese airspace early Wednesday, but that Taiwanese planes intercepted them and chased them back out of the area. China sent Su-30 and J-10 fighters. No serious incidents were reported.

Taiwanese officials condemned the “unilateral actions,” and tried to link them to President Tsai’s call for a coalition of democracies to defend freedom in the region. It seems clear, however, that the missile tests precipitated the reaction from China.

Tensions between China and India are reaching a multi-decade worst today, as troops on both sides exchanged fire along the disputed border at Kashmir. Both sides are blaming the other for provocations, and said they fired “warning shots.”

There was fighting along the border back in mid-June, with troops on both sides using metal bats to beat one another to death, and officials proudly assuring that there was no gunfire. Today’s gunfire is the first confirmed shots fired since 1975.

Both nations massed troops at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) back in June, and seemingly were waiting for an excuse to start fighting. Both sides are saying the other started this, with Chinese officials saying Indian troops “blatantly fired” on the border patrol, and India saying Chinese troops fired first to intimidate them.

Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,

The next phase of the 25-year deal between China and Iran will focus on a large-scale roll-out of electronic espionage and warfare capabilities focused around the port of Chabahar and extending for a nearly 5,000 kilometre (3,000 mile) radius, and the concomitant build-out of mass surveillance and monitoring of the Iranian population, in line with the standard operating procedure across China, senior sources close to the Iranian government told OilPrice.com last week.

During an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Watters’ World,” Breitbart News senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer, discussed his forthcoming documentary, “Riding the Dragon: Uncovering the Bidens’ Chinese Secrets.”

Schweizer laid out Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s ties to Communist China, which he warned could have national security implications for the United States.

Nikkei Asian Review has more details on Xi Jinping's ongoing purge in preparation to establish total authority over China's Communist Party, including related to some recent key, deeply symbolic acts:

Also on Aug. 26, Xi convened a meeting of 300 or so senior police and state security officials from across the country at Beijing's Great Hall of the People.

In a pompous ceremony, Xi handed to the police force a newly designed red and blue flag.

The red portion, occupying the top half of the flag, symbolizes the party and is meant to portray the police's absolute loyalty to the party, it was explained.

It ultimately means that for the first time the country's police forces are under Xi's direct control, instead under the immediate oversight of the government's State Council.

Each time Xi seeks to take control of a branch of law enforcement, he confers a flag.

The film, which was released on YouTube earlier this week, features a spate of deals that Hunter Biden was allegedly involved in as a board member of a Beijing-based investment company during Obama's presidency.

A new documentary has claimed that business activity in China conducted by Hunter Biden, son of the US Democratic presidential nominee, under President Barack Obama, served Beijing's "strategic interests" and may have damaged US national security.

The 41-minute film, called "Riding the Dragon: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets", was posted by the Blaze TV network on YouTube in six segments earlier this week. Joe Biden's election campaign has not commented on the issue yet.

China recently launched the "Clean Plate Campaign," which targets people wasting food, as speculation of a worldwide food shortage mounts.

President Xi Jinping has pushed new measures to curb food waste following the virus pandemic, calling those who live stream their eating experiences on social media as "shocking and distressing."

Jinping said China had to "maintain a sense of crisis about food security" amid the virus pandemic. The warning comes as the world's second-largest economy could soon face food shortages. Besides the virus-induced economic downturn disrupting food supply chains, there's been droughts, floods, and pests that are likely to result in poor harvests this year.

Chinese state news agency, the Global Times, downplayed the notion China is headed for a food crisis. Some restaurants in China have limited the number of dishes served to diners, while others have weighed customers before ordering.

Nothing could be more ridiculous than U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declaring last month that the United States would launch a five-pronged effort under the so-called "Clean Network" program to protect U.S. assets.

Under this initiative, the United States will seek to remove "untrusted" Chinese apps such as TikTok and WeChat from U.S. mobile app stores, limit the ability of Chinese cloud service providers like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent to access cloud-based systems in the United States, and ensure undersea cables "are not subverted for intelligence gathering" by China.

Pompeo has been mongering his "China threat" theory around the world, urging others to guard against China "stealing user data." But what about the track record of the United States in this regard?

Ever since the early stages of the US-China trade/tech/virus/cold war four years ago, there were frequent rumors - which eventually gave way to increasingly legitimate chatter - that China was looking to go full "nuclear option" by selling some or all of its $1+ trillion of US Treasury securities, which incidentally has not been too far off the mark: as the chart below shows, after peaking in 2013, Chinese holdings of US debt have been steadily declining (and not so steadily in the aftermath of the Chinese devaluation), and are currently near the lowest level in 8 years.

On July 21, two U.S Air Force B-1B bombers took off from Guam and headed west over the Pacific Ocean to the hotly contested South China Sea. The sleek jets made a low-level pass over the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its escorting fleet, which was exercising nearby in the Philippines Sea, according to images released by the U.S. military.

The operation was part of the Trump administration’s intensifying challenge to China’s ruling Communist Party and its sweeping territorial claims over one of the world’s most important strategic waterways. While senior Trump officials launch diplomatic and rhetorical broadsides at Beijing, the U.S. Defense Department is turning to the firepower of its heavily armed, long-range bombers as it seeks to counter Beijing’s bid to control the seas off the Chinese coast.

Washington’s goal is to get countries in the Indo-Pacific region to work together as a bulwark against ‘a potential challenge from China’, says the US official- He says the four nations are expected to meet in Delhi sometime this autumn

Washington aims to formalise its closer Indo-Pacific defence relations with India, Japan and Australia – also known as “the quad” – into something more closely resembling the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nat), a senior US State Department official said on Monday.

The US government’s goal is to get the grouping of four countries and others in the region to work together as a bulwark against “a potential challenge from China” and “to create a critical mass around the shared values and interests of those parties in a manner that attracts more countries in the Indo-Pacific and even from around the world … ultimately to align in a more structured manner”, said Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun.

A soldier of Tibetan origin with India's special forces has reportedly been killed in the latest border confrontation between India and China on their contested Himalayan border, fuelling concerns of a wider military confrontation between the two regional powers.

The death is the first reported from two incidents occurring within 48 hours on the border, two months after a battle that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead.

India and China, which fought a border war in 1962, have each accused the other of trying to cross their unofficial frontier in the Ladakh region in an attempt to gain territory.

The Indian government has not commented on the reports of the death, but Namgyal Dolkar Lhagyari, a member of the Tibetan Parliament in exile, told AFP news agency on Tuesday that the Tibetan-origin soldier was "martyred during the clash" on Saturday night. She did not identify the soldier by name.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Wednesday morning announced severe new restrictions on Chinese diplomats in the United States.

He cited that American diplomats in China "face constant barriers to their work" and so Washington is responding in a commensurate way.

"Today, the State Department imposed new requirements on senior PRC diplomats conducting meetings and events in the U.S. We will always advocate for fair treatment of our diplomats abroad," Pompeo introduced.

This includes requiring senior Chinese diplomats working in the US to seek formal approval from the State Department in order to visit any American university campus or meet with local or state government officials.

In a press briefing the top US diplomat cited China's own "opaque approval process" for American diplomatic personnel working in China, which ultimately prevents them from "conducing regular business, attending events, securing meetings, and connecting with the Chinese people."

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

In northeast Syria last week, a U.S. military vehicle collided with a Russian armored vehicle, injuring four American soldiers.

Both the Americans and Russians blame each other for failing to follow established rules of the road. Had an American been killed, we could have had a crisis on our hands.

Query: With the ISIS caliphate dead and buried, why are 500 U.S. troops still in Syria a year after Donald Trump said we would be pulling them out? What are they doing there to justify risking a clash with Russian troops who are in Syria as the invited allies of the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad, whether we approve of his regime or not?

Nor was this the only U.S.-Russian faceoff last week.

A U.S. Navy warship has transited the narrow and sensitive Taiwan Strait for the second time in two weeks.

Taiwan's Defence Ministry confirmed the operation on Monday amid rising tensions between China and the United States.

The ministry said a U.S. destroyer, which it did not name, had sailed in a southerly direction through the strait and was continuing to sail south.

As Washington and Beijing continue to spar over the latter’s assertion of territorial claims in the South China Sea, the war of words has the two nations lurching ever closer to an actual shooting war, with all that will entail.

The dispute has escalated in the past days and weeks, with the US slapping sanctions on Chinese officials and companies involved in the construction of several man-made islands in the region, and the US and Chinese militaries facing off in increasingly provocative and confrontational encounters.

India and China have been in a border stand-off along the 4,057 km Line of Actual Control since the last week of April. The violent face-off between the troops of the neighbouring countries in Pangong Tso on 15 June left 20 Indian army soldiers dead, resulting in a series of disengagement talks at the diplomatic and military level.

The Indian Army has revealed that fresh clashes erupted between the troops of China and India during the night, on 29-30 August, when the People's Liberation Army carried out "provocative military movements" in the eastern Ladakh region.

"On the night of 29/30 August, People's Liberation Army troops violated the previous consensus arrived at during military and diplomatic engagements during an ongoing standoff in Eastern Ladakh and carried out provocative military movements to change the status quo," said Colonel Aman Anand, PRO, Army.

Authored by Lawrence Franklin via The Gatestone Institute,

Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping's signature foreign policy proposal has been the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) commercial and strategic program. At first, the network was pitched as a restoration of the ancient overland trade route, the "Silk Road," that linked China to Europe. This "New Silk Road," like its predecessor, would traverse the vast steppes of Central Asia -- but the contemporary BRI is allegedly meant to serve also as an economic boon for all the countries along the route.

Xi quickly followed the overland BRI with a maritime version, presumably to connect Chinese ports on the South China Sea to seaports in the Indian Ocean, continuing on to the Middle East states and ultimately reaching European ports. Initially, these proposals had only involved countries along BRI routes.

The guided-missile destroyer the USS Mustin has entered the South China Sea and is sailing near the Paracel Islands. The islands are claimed by China, though the US does not recognize that claim. China objected that they didn’t authorize the US to sail there.

National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien called China’s claims in the South China Sea ‘ridiculous,’ saying they’ve been rejected by all the major countries. Most countries in the region have conflicting claims in the South China Sea, and to the extent they overlap with Chinese claims, the US backs everyone else’s claims.

In rejecting their claims, the US has repeatedly carried out “freedom of navigation” exercises near Chinese claims just to prove that they can’t enforce those claims. China is objecting to those incursions, and earlier this week fired anti-ship missiles into contested waters to prove they could challenge those ships if they have to.

In a rare comment about potentially boycotting American products, China's foreign ministry spokesman warned Friday if the Trump administration goes ahead with a ban on the popular messaging app WeChat, from mid-September on, then it would result in Chinese consumers ditching iPhones and other Apple products.

"If WeChat is banned, then there will be no reason why Chinese shall keep iPhone and apple products," Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijan tweeted.

In a bizarre exchange of what may or may not be fake news, today China's Global Times claimed that the Chinese People's Liberation Army "expelled a US warship that trespassed into China's territorial waters in the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea on Thursday, near an ongoing Chinese military exercise zone that reportedly featured live-fire anti-ship ballistic missile launches."

The USS Mustin, a US Navy guided missile destroyer, trespassed into the China's territorial waters in the Xisha Islands on Thursday, and the PLA Southern Theater Command dispatched naval and air forces to track, identify and warn it leave, said Senior Colonel Li Huamin, a spokesperson for the PLA Southern Theater Command on early Friday.

Beijing has cautioned against further US naval operations in the South China Sea, claiming that recent activities by the American side create conditions for an unintentional military confrontation.
A spokesman for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) said on Friday that a US warship entered Chinese territorial waters without permission.

“We urge the US to stop such provocative behavior and restrict its maritime actions to avoid possible military accidents,” Senior Colonel Li Huamin said, adding that PLA naval and aerial forces monitored the vessel as it traveled through the South China Sea.

The US Navy said that the USS Martin carried out a “routine” operation in the region. Washington has cited the so-called “freedom of navigation” principle to defend its regular activity in the sea.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog (originally posted at The Asia Times),

Beijing-Moscow is already on; Berlin-Beijing is a work in progress; the missing but not distant link is Berlin-Moscow..

We have seen how China is meticulously planning all its crucial geopolitical and geoeconomic moves all the way to 2030 and beyond.

What you are about to read next comes from a series of private, multilateral discussions among intel analysts, and may helpfully design the contours of the Big Picture.

In China, it’s clear the path ahead points to boosting internal demand, and shifting monetary policy towards the creation of credit to consolidate the building of world-class domestic industries.

The Pentagon revealed Thursday that China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) "warning" to the US on Wednesday involved the firing of “four medium-range missiles into [an] area between Hainan and the Paracel Islands,” a defense official was quoted in FT.

Among them included nuclear-capable DF-26 missile and the anti-ship DF-21D ballistic missile. Beijing said they demonstrated the PLA's ability to deny outside military access to the South China Sea.

The missiles were fired in response to the major incident from Tuesday, wherein China's PLA military angrily charged that a US U-2 spy plane entered a 'no-fly zone' off China's coast while the PLA conducted live-fire military drills.

The PLA has since ratcheted up its drills, with FT reporting Thursday the military "announced it was conducting another live fire exercise in waters off the eastern city of Taizhou, bringing the number of drills off its coast this week to five."

For the past months the Peoples’ Republic of China has been subject to one after the other devastating shocks to its agriculture sector. A deadly outbreak of African Swine Fever that halved China’s huge pig herds in 2019, was followed by infestation from a plague of fall armyworms (FAW) which reached China in December, 2018 and now threaten China’s corn belt. Now the worst floods in some 60 years is wiping out major rice and other crops in central China along the Yangtze and other rivers. Food Security is one of six national priorities for national security. President Xi Jinping has just issued a call to citizens not to waste food or face penalties, a sign that the depth of the food security threat is far worse than thought.

China’s food supplies remain stable and consumers should not be “overly anxious” or even resort to “panic buying”, a senior agriculture ministry official said on Wednesday, following recent uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Still, farmers and traders should prevent food waste caused by improper storage, while farmers who stockpile in the hope of later gains should be wary that prices could turn against them, ministry official Tang Ke told a briefing.

President Xi Jinping raised the issue of food security earlier this month when he spoke about “shameful” food wastage, while a government think tank has warned about a looming food supply gap by 2025.

Let’s start with the story of an incredibly disappearing summit.

Every August, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) converges to the town of Beidaihe, a seaside resort some two hours away from Beijing, to discuss serious policies that then coalesce into key planning strategies to be approved at the CCP Central Committee plenary session in October.

The Beidaihe ritual was established by none other than Great Helmsman Mao, who loved the town where, not by accident, Emperor Qin, the unifier of China in the 3rd century B.C., kept a palace.

2020 being, so far, a notorious Year of Living Dangerously, it’s no surprise that in the end Beidaihe was nowhere to be seen. Yet Beidaihe’s invisibility does not mean it did not happen.

In the latest tit-for-tat South China Sea saga, China has denounced the United States, lodging "stern representations" with the US embassy, over Pentagon attempts to spy on live-fire military drills over what Beijing claims is its sovereign airspace.

Specifically, according to Reuters, the US is charged with "sending a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane into a no-fly zone over Chinese live-fire military drills on Tuesday, further ratcheting up tensions between Beijing and Washington."

As the Trump Administration works to keep the flow of aggressive China-related headlines flowing across social media, Politico reported on Tuesday that the administration is weighing the possibility of labeling Beijing's treatment of Muslim minority Uighurs a “genocide".

Of course, for this label to have any real power or affect, it would have to be backed by the UN Security Council. And seeing as China has a permanent seat and veto power, the odds of this ever flying at the UN are virtual impossible.

A Texas A&M University professor and NASA researcher has been charged with conspiracy and accused of collaborating with several Chinese entities, while his grant explicitly prohibited him from doing so.

Zhengdong Cheng, a professor in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M who also worked on projects for NASA, was arrested by the FBI over the weekend, the Department of Justice said Monday.

Well, that on again, off again between the US and China to discuss the "progress" on the Phase 1 of the trade deal finally took place tonight, with the US Trade Representative office announcing tonight that Ambassador Lighthizer and Secretary Mnuchin participated in "a regularly scheduled call this evening" with China's Vice Premier Liu Hu to discuss implementation of the historic Phase One Agreement between the United States and China.

According to the USTR, the parties addressed steps that China has taken to effectuate structural changes called for by the Agreement that will ensure greater protection for intellectual property rights, remove impediments to American companies in the areas of financial services and agriculture, and eliminate forced technology transfer.

Considering that China has done virtually nothing so far, we can only imagine that this was the shortest US-China call in history.

When the Trump administration withheld billions of dollars in security aid to Pakistan in 2018, the logic then was that the Pakistani military would be forced to form greater ties with the US and surrounding allies to reclaim lost aid.

Fast forward today, the new reality, Pakistan abandoned the West and its allies for China.

Pakistan quickly bolstered ties with China via billions of dollars in Belt and Road projects over the last two years. China has also provided the Pakistani military with aircraft, weaponry, and other advanced hardware. The cooperation between both countries has taken another giant leap as China just delivered the first of four "most advanced" warships to the Pakistani Navy, a move that will clearly upset India and the US.

As the world’s second largest economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, its steel sector reached record high output last month, according to fresh industry data.

China produced 93.36 million tons of crude steel in July, or 3.05 million tons a day, which is over nine percent more than it did over the same period last year, Chinese media reported on Monday citing the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA). The figures coincide with data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), released earlier this month.

July crude steel output exceeded the previous monthly record of 92.27 tons set in May. From January to July, China churned out 593.17 million tons of crude steel, with production rising 2.8 percent year-on-year, the NBS data showed.

A new bill introduced in Washington seeks to change the way the federal government refers to the leader of China, prohibiting the use of the term "president", and will - if passed - lead to a dramatic escalation in already tense relations between the two superpowers. According to the SCMP, the "Name the Enemy Act" would require that official US government documents instead refer to the head of state according to his or her role as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, holds three official titles, none of which is “president”: head of state (guojia zhuxi, literally “state chairman”); chairman of the central military commission; and general secretary of the CCP. However, in the English-speaking world, Xi has generally opted for “president”, which critics say "offers unwarranted legitimacy" to an unelected leader.

It was a year ago that the Pentagon first announced it would move forward with plans to deploy intermediate range ballistic missiles to Asia "within months" — an ambitious timeline which of course never materialized, nevertheless a prospect that's remained on the table ever since, driving tensions higher as part of what Beijing has slammed repeatedly as Washington's "Cold War mentality".

In a new statement China's Foreign Ministry has vowed it will take "countermeasures" should any US ally in the region agree to host American missiles.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed that the United Nations Security Council snapback sanctions on Iran will resume and if China, Russia, or any other country does not follow them, the United States will respond by imposing sanctions on them.

Pompeo said, “30 days from now, all the sanctions that were in place will resume. They have been temporarily paused because of the ridiculous nuclear deal, and the world will be a safer place. The Iranians won’t have the chance to have Russian air-defense systems, Chinese tanks, all the things that pose risk and instability in the Middle East. The Gulf states are all excited about — Israel is excited about it. It’ll reduce their risk, and it’ll make Americans safer too.”

Host Bret Baier then asked, “So when China or Russia refuse, is the administration going to hold them accountable with sanctions too?”